2. Disease Burden from Viral Hepatitis

I am data driven, so I am going to start with
disease burden. These are the things that you already know. Lots of infections unfortunately still go
on. Here in the data from 2001, you see that
almost 100,000 people were infected with hepatitis A, 100,000 people
were infected with hepatitis B, and 25-30,000 people were infected
with hepatitis C. So, disease burden in terms of what is still
going on is quite substantial. These numbers represent at least a 50%
reduction from what you would see if you go back 10 years earlier, in
1990. People with chronic infections, again -
large numbers. These numbers remain fairly stable, although some
people might argue that for hepatitis B we haven't revised the
numbers, and that is kind of a gap looking at our current
data. There are a fairly large number of deaths
occurring; with about 12-15,000 people dying from what we believe is
viral hepatitis-related chronic liver disease.